Finding the heart and soul in a piece of wood

Monthly Archives: May 2013

This is the final part of my assessment. Here is a slide show of my original photographic images and the types of shots taken.

Hope you like them as I have had fun doing this unit.

My portrait shot lost some clarity and focus in the translation from my original RAW image down to JPEG and even more when it was transferred into PowerPoint and then Slideshare. I have converted the RAW image to JPEG again and resized it to 1000W so that the original image hopefully gives more clarity to my portrait…Here it is…

I took another image to illustrate portraiture and eyelines with a more traditional setting as follows…I would like to call this image “It’s not easy being green and filled with delicious fluff…”

Here is a more appropriate image to illustrate shallow perspective. I didn’t realise that angles were preferable and was lucky to have taken a lot of images while I was in Launceston last Monday to choose another example from…

For this assessment task we had to take some original photographs (wherever possible) to be used as hero shots in some predesigned wire frame web page templates. We had to match colours and fonts to the existing text whilst bearing in mind the overall look and feel of the site and the image. Here are my 5 hero shot web sites

1. Real Estate

I attempted to match the text colour to the pre-existing text colour in the web site. I went with a font that was as close to the existing feel on the template. I cropped my image to suit the requirements of the site and I used the clone and heal tools to take a white line out of the road that was distracting from the image.

2. Golf Course

I really like the way that this looks apart from the roses in the image. I tried to use an elegant font to give the image a classy upmarket feel. The colour of the text was matched to the green

3. Tourism

This is a photograph taken of the path leading to Liffey Falls. I matched the yellow used at the top of the page and I used a black stroke to make the text very visible.

4. Chocolate Retailer

As we live a fair way away from the city we were unable to find a chocolate shop and used images taken from morgue File Free Photos at http://www.morguefile.com/archive . I attempted to colour match the text to the predominate colours in the site and I used an elegant font to highlight the luxurious nature of Belgian chocolate

5. Local Council

There was a telephone pole where I wanted to put the text in this image so I used the heal and clone tool to remove the pole from the skyline and the building allowing me to have enough space to place the text needed. I colour matched the text to the website header and used a drop shadow to highlight it.

After some tweaking here are some new shots of two of the above images. The Launceston Council building needed a bit of an overhaul. I changed the image completely and decided to use the iconic, and instantly recognisable building in Launceston City Centre and I played with the text a little to minimise tension and a bit of cramping. Here is my new submission

The final re-do is the image of the real estate agents. I decided that the original shot wasn’t opulent enough and after some research on real estate websites, I got the feeling that there is some merit in going with an exclusive “feature” house to attract the buyer. As the catch phrase was “I can’t wait to get home…” I wanted to reflect this in the image. Who wouldn’t want to race home and spend every waking hour in this house? I know “I” certainly would! Here is my new selection with slightly darker text…

I’m back lol … ok so here we are again with a nifty little fix that my lecturer just sent me, I added a new layer, I grouped the text and the layer together, played with the opacity and some blending options on the text and I also added a gradient to the banner box because I thought it looked nice. Cheers for that tutorial by the way, it’s a great text effect that I wouldn’t have ever thought of doing but it works. Here is my new image…

Guess who … yeah its me again lol here’s another go of this ,this ones my fault as I missed the drop shadow on one of my text lines and I have now lined up the texts so they are a lot more uniform hope that you guys out there are getting a good idea of the changes that are taking place , some are subtle and some are a little more obvious . Without further ado here it is 😉

I have tried to mirror the Launceston logo ( top left corner) here with the Launceston city council text so it appears in a lined up box form I think its pretty close to theres. I like mine better lol

This is part 1 of our photo shop assessment and for this we have to populate a template with images and text . We have to try and keep in my principles of design whilst using our images and text . Here’s my idea for a web page.

I don’t think it came out to bad and I like the colour scheme between the text and the background.

There was a bit of a problem with the colour of the Font in the Header/Hero Shot clashing and competing with the detail of the guitar inlay. I decided to match the colour of the inlay and use a thin stroke around the outside which I think works well and takes away that competition for the space. I also changed the image of the hairy hippy in the top right hand 4 larger thumbnails. He was just too amazing and outshone the rest of the images with his stunning resemblance to Jimi Hendrix ;). I used another image of “old faithful” to remove the distraction…

For this learning task we were asked to photograph motion and to add metadata to one of our chosen three images. Here are my images

1.

This photograph was taken on the Kayena stage of Targa Tasmania 2013. I really like the way that the front of the car is slightly blurred whilst the back is crisp and clear giving a good idea how fast the car was travelling at the time of the shot. I used a Fuji S5700 on A.P. mode. I focussed on the car as it came up the road and followed the car as it passed where I was standing and took the shot when I felt that the car was in the best position for the best shot.

2.

This image was taken just on dusk on the Batman Bridge. This image involves me attempting to take a motion blur shot of a truck and some cars as they travel across the bridge. I used my tripod and my Canon EOS 11ooD camera to take this image. I used a long shutter speed (15 seconds) to get the maximum blur from the lights, not that many cars use this bridge at the best of times

3.

This image was taken at Punchbowl Reserve in Launceston. I was amazing lucky to get this shot because at the time, I didn’t have my tripod with me. This is shot number 10 of 10 taken. I chose this image to use for my metadata image. As you can see by the picture, the movement is in the water. I used my Canon for this shot and the resulting soft floury appearance of the water gives a very romantic feel to this image.

Today we were asked to make a PNG logo. My logo is comprised of a monkey with the world as his face and some text. We were asked to test our logo in a predesigned web page to see if it worked alright. As you can see my monkey worked. I enjoyed undertaking this task, it was fun and gave me a chance to mess around a bit with what we have been learning in Photoshop and other programs

Here is my monkey logo situated in the upper left hand corner of the web page that we were given to test our logo’s in. Cute isn’t he 😉

For this assignment I had to create a photoshop using 10 images and layer combined. I then had to choose the best format to save them in .

I saved the picture as a GIF a JPEG and a PNG. I chose the web saved as 50 jpeg as it offered the best file size out of the 3 and the overall best quality for its size . The png was a very good file but was 1.93mb over the jpeg at 233kb and the gif lost quality and had a size of 928kb.

I have tried to give unity in my images through sizes and colours, I have tried to give a flow and lead the eye from the top left corner to the bottom right by using a darker top left through to a final lighter image .

I have included my initial sketch based on a 8×4 grid and I have also included an image with the same grid overlayed to show the final effect.

Sketch

The image saved as a JPEG

The image with the grid overlay

here’s the redone image as the centre pictures slight misalignment was leading the eye and causing a distraction. I also resized the the 2 far left images just to give a little more harmony

For this assignment we had to create web backgrounds and find some web pages we liked . here are the ones I liked firstly .

This appeals to my musical background 🙂

How could this webpage not grab you . its a very dominant page with deep colours and a lot of interest.

A very bright eye catching site that is also a good learning site. This site has a good use of colours

Now here are the backgrounds that I made . The first one is from the scan I did earlier in the course and I have used a gradient on it so that the page can take over from the bottom of the image.

Not to bad an effect on this and I could use it fairly easily I think.

This is my web background which is only one pixel deep and it is then repeated over the page .

I was going to post the one pixel high starting image for this but word press doesn’t seem to let me

That tiny line above is the original that I managed to post here but cant actually see when I make the post lol.

Tiled background from one image

One thing that needs to be considered when creating a tiled image is obvious repetition. As you can see from my image above there is a degree of repetition to the image. This can be greatly minimised by using a larger image to create the tile. I had to use some cloning and healing brush techniques to deal with the areas where the repeated pattern was most obvious. If I was attempting to create a tiled background, I wouldn’t use a very complex image as the amount of work to make it appear natural would be in the extreme and not worth the time spent in my opinion.